JL Dutaut’s digest of the week’s educational research. Click on the headings to access the source materials
Recruitment and retention
A new Best Practice Network survey reveals that school leaders might have reached the end of what they can do to recruit and retain staff without government assistance.
Of 742 respondents, nearly half (49 per cent) cited recruitment as their biggest headache, while retention was the top choice for 29 per cent. Pay comes second to workload reduction in their efforts to recruit and retain the staff they need. More than three-quarters (77 per cent) say they have already made changes to that end, with a further 13 per cent planning to do so. Meanwhile, 71 per cent are already remunerating staff differently from or above national pay scales, and 10 per cent are looking to follow suit.
But the most revealing statistic might be what leaders say they will prioritise over the next two years. While 68 per cent say curriculum support is a priority to recruit and retain staff right now, a further 18 per cent say they will focus more on it. And while 63 per cent try to incentivise staff with enhanced CPD now, a further quarter (24 per cent) say it is set to become a priority. That would see enhanced CPD (87 per cent) and curriculum support (86 per cent) edge out pay (81 per cent) as leaders’ primary mechanism to attract and keep staff.
And yet, developing staff came way down the list of their concerns – cited as the most challenging issue by only 15 per cent of respondents. So, either leaders have been overestimating their success with CPD – or more of them are being forced to go into a gunfight armed only with a knife.
What makes CPD work?
But if school leaders are to invest more in staff development as a recruitment and retention strategy, how can they ensure it is effective?
Last Thursday, the National Foundation for Educational Research and Sheffield Institute of Education published their evaluation of the Teaching and Leadership Innovation Fund (TLIF). A three-year funding programme (which actually ran from September 2017 to May 2022 due to pandemic disruptions), TLIF aimed to support projects offering high-quality CPD in the areas and schools that needed it most.
The objective was to improve pupil outcomes, making “a significant contribution towards tackling social mobility”, but in the end this metric was not explored due to exam cancellations.
The evaluation focused on eight projects delivered by Ambition Institute, EdisonLearning, the Education Development Trust with the Chartered College of Teaching, the Geographical Association with the Association for Science Education, the Institute of Physics, the Teacher Development Trust, Teach First and Tom Bennett Training.
All projects met their recruitment targets and most achieved high levels of participant satisfaction. The NFER identified some features of effective provision.
However, while there was evidence across all projects that “participants had made potentially sustainable changes to their personal practices”, the NFER notes that “at the department and/or school level, there were fewer examples”.
The NFER concluded: “Projects had a positive impact on direct project participants’ retention in teaching but no observable impact on participating schools as a whole.”
Some leaders may rightly feel aggrieved that £75 million wasn’t simply given to the schools that need it most to hang on to their teachers.
Young, gifted and broke
And especially as the aim was social mobility. This week, the Youth Futures Foundation published results of a survey of 2,500 18-to-25-year-olds from ethnic minority backgrounds. It is a sobering read as the cost-of-living takes hold in communities that were already disproportionately affected by Covid.
More than one-third (38 per cent) of the young respondents to the poll conducted independently by Savanta ComRes in August said their mental health has suffered due to financial pressures, nearly matching the 41 per cent who said the same of the pandemic.
Meanwhile, 17 per cent said their school grades had suffered, nearly a quarter said they’d struggled to pay for transport to and from their place of work or education (23 per cent), and nearly one in five (17 per cent) said their relationships with family were suffering.
The Youth Futures Foundation hopes the survey will galvanise investment in closing the employment gap. However, it is also a powerful reminder that a ‘statistically significant but small’ attainment gap could be easily jeopardised.
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